your fate is my toilet

mussels provencale by 'pure spirits'

rating: Doriana 1930 / 10.0

HUGO & THE FRINGE FESTIVAL - I

I am winning by seventeen thousand points maybe. I get points vaguely based on the way my arm fits under my pillow and how badly the other side underperforms compared to me. Winning is not a logical process because I am not even awake, but it still matters because I do not want to be a loser, even though I don't care about being a loser in real life. Losing doesn't matter in real life because real life is pointless. Not completely pointless, but relatively pointless. 

I wake up and take the glasses that are sitting on top of my copy of Slaughterhouse Five, which is lying down next to me on the bed. I put the glasses onto my face. I open the book and finish reading it. It takes me around ninety minutes to finish it. I like the way it talks about the nature of time. I vaguely agree with its description of time; not completely, but relatively. I think my life is also like the Rocky Mountains, and can be seen from beginning to end, and each period of time will eternally be the way it is and there is, in some vague way, nothing I can do about it. However, my life is not actually the Rocky Mountains, it is the Marianas Trench. I stand up and walk around and come back to my bed.

I collapse into my bed, chest first and then onto my face. I roll around to the other end of my bed and stare at the ceiling for forty seconds. I sit up and jump back one meter, sit cross-legged, and stare at the wall wondering if I will ever meet someone who loves me. I try to look forward with a neutral facial expression, but one that is extremely melodramatic, like I am acting in a very slow-paced independent film. 

I stare at the wall adjacent to the bottom of my bed. There is a list on it written in 14 pt font. It goes from the ceiling to the carpet and contains bullet points of things that I like in girls. I really only care about approximately two or three of the bullet points on the list. The other ones are non sequitur preferences. I have met a number of girls that have the approximately two or three important bullet points. One or two of those girls have liked me casually as a 'friend.' They have said to me before, Hi you want to go see this together, or, Hey we should hang out some time. They don't really mean it though. They are just being polite. I want to yell at them as loud as I can, Stop being polite to me! Or I will violently kick this toilet bowl over even if it is full of urine and feces! But I am too scared that they will start avoiding me if I do that. I tell myself I should do it anyways because they already avoid me all the time anyways.

One time they hung out with me. Each, separately--it was actually two or three times. After those two or three times, they, each, never talked to me again unless they ran into me and were forced to talk to me again. Whenever they were forced to talk to me again, they would smile and say, Hey, how are you doing? I would want to say to them, Hi, I am Johannes nice to meet you, because they would feel like strangers to me again. But instead, I would just say, I'm okay, and they would smile and say, We should hang out some time. And then they would never talk to me again until the next time they were forced to talk to me. I convinced myself they did this to everyone they knew. This helped me not cry as much as I sat there in the middle of my bed and looked at the wall in front of me.

Next to the list that went from the ceiling to the carpet was another list. It was the list of girls I knew that had ever liked me in any sort of way that was more than just 'casual.' This list was empty. The list was actually just the rest of the wall. It was a large blank list that was empty and was the whole entire wall. It had a door that was blank and empty as well and opened into a hallway that was blank and empty.

I got up and walked through the doorframe into the hallway that was blank and empty. I had to go see someone in one hour and had to go shower before going to see that person. I thought to myself while entering the bathroom, Maybe during my shower today I will accidentally drown and then die. I wasn't sure then if I felt scared or relieved.

After I showered, I drove to my friend, Kahlil Gibran's, house and listened to a college community radio program on the way. They were featuring some jazz musician today who took a bunch of really popular songs from the past century and reinterpreted them into jazz songs. In his new album he had reinterpretations of Lady Gaga and Elvis and Elton John and other human beings. Some of the songs sounded okay, but most of them sounded like me screaming incoherent words, in my shower, at beams of water coming out of the shower head.

Instead of liquid, I always imagined the beams coming out of the shower head as solid beams that were never continually renewed like segments of a stream in nature. I felt that they were solid beams and once they touched some part of me that was gross, like my butt, I could not move the shower head beams to any other part of my body or else I would be spreading tiny fragments and remnants of feces all over my body and I would smell like feces for the rest of my life, making it seven-thousand times harder for me to find a girl that would ever like me more than in just a 'causal' way.